How to bring your lead generation strategy out of the dark ages

Moving into 2016, organisations want to improve their engagement, lead nurturing and lead gen results. While these have always been standard business goals in the past, companies are realising they will need to change their methods. The only way to see an improvement on current results is to use advanced forward-thinking sales technology.

It will be about quality, not quantity

At the end of the day, return on investment only comes from one area and that is sales-qualified leads. Clicks and website traffic are no longer the measurements MD’s want to see. Of course, lead volume is still important. But it is the quality of leads that is the top lead generation priority for 2016.

In fact, 68% of businesses wish to increase their lead quality in the coming 12 months. Lead volume follows at 55% and measuring marketing at 41%. Which begs the question, what can companies implement to track the quality of their leads?

To increase lead quality, we must first look at what converts leads. Is it price, the content or referrals from current customers? Once you analyse where your current sales-ready leads have come from, you can use a measurement system that will qualify your leads for you.

Lead scoring is still a relatively new term in the lead generation industry, but it will become increasingly important in 2016. Currently, the technology is still developing as it moves away from a time-based algorithm. For example, at WOW Analytics lead scoring is combined with page scoring. As visitors land and then move around the website, they build up a score based on the pages they visit . WOW can then band the scores to identify which leads are sales-qualified and which need a bit more nurturing.

Inbound sales will grow with inbound marketing

The current best practice promotes an 80/20 split in favour of outbound sales driving the higher conversion rates for leads. However, businesses will see their inbound sales increase as inbound marketing goes from strength to strength. In particular, content marketing will change in the coming year to promote businesses who are experts in their industry.

Companies that can anticipate their customers needs and market the solution will see inbound sales drive more sales-qualified leads than outbound.

Although, deciding which content to promote takes a lot of testing and analysis. To ensure your marketing is drawing in leads, you should promote content that has already proven to have a high engagement but low conversion rate. Once you have found those pieces, you can update your call to actions on those pieces of content to drive more website traffic through the sales process. Maybe you focus on a different key page, or perhaps you use visitor tracking software to see where your traffic goes once they’ve read your content.

Knowing the user journey will give you the ability to adapt your content and buyer journey to drive leads through the sales cycle.

Analytics will become more detailed and, therefore, more important

While it isn’t the highest priority for businesses, analytics are still important in determining what methods work in driving leads and determining the quality of them. As Google Analytics continues to provide more detailed data, so too will lead generation companies looking to make businesses lives easier. But you will also be able to use analytics to track your conversion rates from marketing campaigns directly through to sales. This will give organisations and MDs the ability to see exactly what budget they need for successful, forward-thinking lead generation practices.